Happy New Year everybody!  Thought I would start it off right by sharing a little tidbit about working with cross domain files when there are redirects.  Normally if you needs to access the bitmapdata from a file loaded on another domain you need to explicitly tell Flash to check the crossdomain.xml file.  I'm not sure why this isn't the default.

loaderContext = new LoaderContext(true);
loaderContext.checkPolicyFile = true;
...
var yourLoader:Loader = new Loader();
yourLoader.load(YourURLRequest, loaderContext);

This works most of the time, unless the file you're loading is redirected, e.g., Facebook profile images.  Flash isn't smart enough to check for the new domains crossdomain.xml file after a redirect, so you have to manually tell it.  Like so:

Security.loadPolicyFile("http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/crossdomain.xml");

I typically put that right above the LoaderContext code. Problem solved and now you can use an open graph url to load a Facebook profile image.